Testimony Continues in Alleged White House E-Mail Cover-up

(CNSNews.com) - Testimony continued Friday in connection with a lawsuit filed by former Reagan and Bush administration officials who contend their FBI files were improperly acquired by the Clinton administration.

Missing White House e-mails, which could provide "smoking gun" evidence as to who was involved in the FBI file controversy, are now more tantalizing than ever to investigators, who've discovered that President Clinton, Vice President Gore and their wives had private e-mail accounts under pseudonyms.

Robert Haas, a technician for the Northrop-Grumman company, the White House computer contractor, revealed the existence of the e-mail pseudonyms in court testimony in Washington earlier this week.

"For security reasons, I won't go into any part of this until we get some sort of waiver. But there are alternative naming conventions to get mail to the four principals (the Clintons and Gores) that are not public knowledge," Haas said.

Federal Judge Royce Lamberth ordered the Clintons' electronic communications searched for specific terms relating to the FBI files case, the Pentagon's disclosure of the arrest record of former White House employee Linda Tripp and President Clinton's release of personal letters from a former White House aide, Kathleen Willey, who says she was groped by Clinton in the White House.

A White House spokesman said there are no hidden messages in the e-mail accounts and President Clinton has said in the past that he himself does not use e-mail because of security concerns.

"I have no reason to think there's anything that's not on either backup tapes or the electronic archives. We have searched the entire e-mail system to be as responsive as possible," White House spokesman Jake Siewert said in a statement.

The civil lawsuit against the Clinton administration, on behalf of the former Reagan and Bush administration officials, was filed by Judicial Watch, a conservative judicial activist group. Judicial Watch believes the Clinton administration engaged in an e-mail cover-up and even threatened witnesses in the case.

White House computer specialist Daniel Barry, who initially uncovered the e-mail problem and the former director of the White House Office of Administration, Ada Posey, are still being cross-examined in connection with the e-mail case.

US Independent Counsel Robert Ray has decided not to prosecute anyone in connection with the FBI scandal known as "Filegate." According to Ray, his findings turned up no evidence that the FBI files obtained by the Clinton administration were used for partisan political purposes.

But Judicial Watch chairman Larry Klayman has no doubt about the Clinton Administration's culpability in the e-mail controversy.

"No reasonable person listening to this and other court testimony presented in the last several weeks could conclude that the cover-up of the e-mail problem, which included threats and resulted in the production of documents to the Court, Congress and the Independent Counsels, was yet another in a claimed series of innocent bureaucratic snafus. The Clinton-Gore administration is quite competent in both committing crimes and covering them up," Klayman said.

Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton added, "never have we seen such a well-oiled criminal operation in the White House. The Nixon White House was amateur by comparison."

Meanwhile, a Virginia grand jury, empaneled by Ray, subpoenaed Sheryl Hall, the former White House employee who broke the Clinton-Gore e-mail case.

Hall has previously testified that she witnessed threats and intimidation against Clinton White House employees aimed at keeping them quiet about what Hall called the "coverup" of e-mail evidence in a number of Clinton scandals, including the one involving the President and former White House intern Monica Lewinsky.